When you turn your computer on, power flows to all the components instantaneously. This includes the motherboard, hard drives(HDD), fans – essentially everything that is attached to the Power Supply Unit (PSU). Most of the components in your computer have a fairly constant power draw upon start-up, however, this is not the case for hard drives. Due to the nature of how they work, the start-up power they demand to spin up the platters inside can be quite large compared to their normal operating power. Typically, this is not an issue as a everyday computer has only a few hard drives at most. In a 45 Drives unit however, starting all 45 Drives at once draws a lot of power. Therefore, in some cases, it is beneficial to reduce the load on the PSU by staggering the spinup of the HDDs so that they don’t all spin up at once. There are two ways to implement Staggered Spin Up (SSU). In the case of the 45 Drives Storinator, the method of Staggered Spin Up used is the Power Up In Standby

 1. Power Up In Standby (PUIS) mode

Power Up In Standby requires HBA controller support as well HDD support to use. When power is applied to the hard disk drive, the drive will not spin-up until a PUIS Spin-Up command is issued. The HBA controller must issue the command to tell the drive(s) to spin-up before they can be accessed. PUIS can be enabled by tools such as hdparm for drives, which support this feature. It can also be enabled/disabled using the Highpoint WebGUI. It is important to note when using this method that once PUIS is enabled, the drive will not be picked up by a HBA card that does not support PUIS (such as LSI 9201). If you want to use these drives with another HBA card than the Rocket 750 make sure you have disabled PUIS first.NOTE This is the method used to stagger spin up in a Storinator

 2. Pin 11 signalling

Pin 11 signalling requires HBA controller support as well as a intermediary such as a backplane to function. Pin 11 of the SATA Power Interface controls whether SSU is enabled or not. When the drive is initially powered on, the controller/backplane senses whether Pin 11 is left floating (high or ‘1’ logic state) or grounded (low or ‘0’ logic state). SSU is disabled when Pin 11 is grounded. When disabled, the drive will spin-up as soon as power is applied to it. The drive will not spin-up until the SATA Phy Interface becomes active with a connection to a SATA controller or SATA RAID controller. NOTE this method does not work with Storinator as the HDDs are powered directly from the PSU; the controller cannot monitor the power pins of the SATA interface

For more information on using staggered spin up, watch our video: http://youtu.be/pNu53PTAIcs

What Hard Drives Support the PUIS Method of SSU?

We have reached out to the major HDD manufacturers to get a list of which drives support PUIS.

• ALL WESTERN DIGITAL DRIVES SUPPORT PUIS(PM2 in their terms). This includes Enterprise Level Western Digital drives: Ae, Re (more to be added as they are verified)

They will always be supported in the HPT WebGUI. A jumper can be placed used on the drives themselves can be placed to manually force them into PUIS(PM2). They will however only be able to be spun up in a machine that supports PUIS (i.e the R750 HBA card) http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/other/2579-001037.pdf

• ALL TOSHIBA DRIVES in the DT01ABAxxx and the DT01ACAxxx families support PUIS.

• Seagate has not yet shared which drives do and don’t support PUIS. From experience in the 45Drives lab, we have seen some Seagate drives support this and some that don’t. Below is a list of known Seagate Drives that DO NOT support PUIS.

  * ST1000NM033
  * ST3000VM002

Should I Be Using Staggered Spin Up?

When considering Consumer Class drives, staggered spin up is not required for any of three models, Q30, S45, XL60.

When considering Enterprise Class drives, staggered spin up is not required for the Q30 or the S45. Staggered Spin is required for the XL60.

It is important to note that the speed of the platter in the HDD directly effects start up power draw, Enterprise or Consumer. (5400rpm pull less current than 7200rpm and so on…) And you may experience lower rpm enterprise drives that pull less current consumer drives

How Do I Enable/Disable Staggered Spin Up?

There are two ways to enable/disable SSU in a 45Drives Machine. Note Enabling SSU using either of the following methods will cause the drives to be unusable in another a machine that does not support PUIS method of SSU. Therefore if you plan on using any of
your drives in another machine instead of the Storinator either disable SSU first or verify that the other machine supports the PUIS method of SSU.

1. Using the Highpoint WebGUI (recommended)

To enable/disable SSU using the Highpoint WebGUI.
Locally you can either use the icon on the Desktop or point your browser to localhost:7402
Remotely you can get the webgui using the IP of the server rather than localhost.

Navigate to the Physical tab

Select Spin Up

Now you will see your drives listed under the Spinup Disabled. You may now select as many drives as you would like to enable SSU.

2. Command line tool called ‘hdparm’

You must install this tool first before you can use it:
in CentOS you can use yum install hdparm

To use it see the following commands:

TO TURN SSU ON

Open a terminal and run as root, then run the following command

[root@45Drives Desktop]# hdparm -s1 –yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing /dev/sdax

The output will look like the following (where /dev/sdax is the drive you want to enable SSU on)

/dev/sdax: setting power-up in standby to 1 (on)

TO TURN SSU OFF

Run the following command

[root@45Drives Desktop]# hdparm -s0 /dev/sdax

The output will look like the following (where /dev/sdax is the drive you want to disable SSU on)

/dev/sdax: spin-up: setting power-up in standby to 0 (off)

WHEN TRYING TO ENABLE/DISABLE ON DEVICE THAT DOES NOT SUPPORT PUIS method of SSU

[root@45Drives Desktop]# hdparm -s1 –yes-i-know-what-i-am-doing /dev/sdh

/dev/sdh: setting power-up in standby to 1 (on)
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

[root@45Drives Desktop]# hdparm -s0 /dev/sdh

/dev/sdh:spin-up:SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
setting power-up in standby to 0 (off)
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00